[ASEEES Admin]

Senior Manager for Public Services

The Center for Jewish History (NYC | cjh.org) is one of the world’s great sites of research into the Jewish past. It is the collaborative home to five in-house partners—American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. When the Center opened its doors eighteen years ago, it made a commitment to preserve the collections housed within its walls and make them accessible to scholars, students, and diverse audiences by implementing a unique, shared services model across all five partners. In recent years, the Center has taken on a wide-ranging educational mission and dedicated itself with new passion to interpreting historical sources in meaningful ways to as wide a public as possible.

The Center for Jewish History seeks a Senior Manager for Public Services to take a leading role in increasing the accessibility of and advancing public engagement with the collections. The Senior Manager will join a dynamic team of colleagues dedicated to collaboratively advancing the Center’s shared services model and maximizing discoverability of collections that total more than 30,000 linear feet of archival materials, 500,000 volumes, thousands of art and artifacts, and nearly 50 TB of digital assets.

The Senior Manager fosters consistent, high-caliber service to both researchers and the five partner organizations. The Senior Manager reports to the Director of Archive and Library Services and oversees all operations in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and the Ackman and Ziff Family Genealogy Institute, which are open to the public and together handle annually over 3,500 researcher visits, as well as the Scholars’ Lounge and the David Berg Rare Book Room.

Responsibilities:
• Ensure excellent service to researchers in a closed stack environment through the management of a team of 7 full- and part-time librarians and archivists. Team management includes providing direction and mentoring staff; training new staff; determining reference desk scheduling; and continually evaluating and fine-tuning workflows.
• Update, enforce and/or create policies to further professionalize the Center’s access practices and improve researcher’s experience.
• Engage with school groups, lead instructional sessions for researchers, and guide staff in developing curriculum guides for educators.
• Collaborate across Center departments and with partners to design, develop, execute, and analyze new services, pilot projects and programs.
• Support the planning, curation, and implementation of online and physical exhibitions to promote and increase public engagement with collections.
• Promote and advocate for the work undertaken by the department, including participating in coordinated outreach efforts, special tours, and maintenance of statistics on output.
• Complete tasks associated with grant-funded projects, including proposing and helping to shape new projects; assisting in determining funding sources; building and controlling all project budgets; and contributing content to narrative and financial grant reports.
• Contribute to discussions about user experience and the Center’s systems.
• Determine and monitor spending in the departmental budgets, including electronic resources management.
• Participate in professional organizations and represent the Center at relevant conferences and other events as appropriate.
• Handle other mission-driven projects as directed by the Director of Archive and Library Services.

Required Qualifications:
• Master’s degree from an ALA-accredited library school or similar graduate-level training, such as archival science.
• Minimum of 2-3 years experience managing staff.
• Minimum of 2-3 years experience managing projects from planning to completion—preferably in reference, instruction, education, and/or exhibition areas.
• Minimum of 4 years experience in handling reference inquiries.
• Familiarity with the current issues and current standards relevant to reference and access services in archives and libraries.
• Commitment to fostering a collaborative work environment and presenting diplomatic, adaptable and pragmatic approaches to problem-solving.
• Ability to work creatively in a rapidly changing complex environment, set priorities, and meet tight deadlines.
• Excellent communication and writing skills.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Dedicated interest in and awareness of Jewish history.
• Acquisitions experience.
• Familiarity with one language represented in the multilingual partner collections, such as Yiddish, Hebrew, German, or Russian.

The Center for Jewish History is committed to diversity and inclusion. Qualified individuals who bring diverse perspectives to the workplace are especially encouraged to apply.

Review of applications will begin immediately. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Send cover letter and resume to Rachel Miller, Director of Archive and Library Services, at rcmiller@cjh.org. No phone calls, please.

https://www.cjh.org/about/employment-opportunities
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Rachel Miller
Director of Archive and Library Services
Center for Jewish History
15 W. 16th St.
New York, NY 10011
rcmiller@cjh.org
https://www.cjh.org/

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